A better way forward for Gen Z

freedom and aspiration is the way forward for young people, says freya leach in her remarks to launch the centre for youth policy.

Our mission here at the Centre for the Youth Policy is to reach every young Australian with a liberal message and our liberal values, those being freedom and aspiration.

And to then support the Liberal Party to create policy that is rooted in those values, but that speaks to the challenges facing young Australians today. It's no secret that young people aren't voting for us. Of the 45 electorates with the highest proportion of young people between the age of 18 and 29, we hold just five of them.

And people my age, I'm 20 years old, are more likely to vote for the Greens than they are for the Coalition. And the problem is that this challenge is only going to get more acute as more Gen Z and young people like myself turn 18 and are eligible to vote and more of our older citizens pass on.

That's estimated to create about a 2% swing to left-wing parties every election cycle. So it's only going to get worse. Even more concerningly, the old adage that people get more conservative as they get older seems to be breaking down. Millennials and Gen Z are actually abandoning the Liberal Party as they get older rather than moving towards it.

So at this rate, it's quite a bleak picture. And if this trend continues, it will be catastrophic for our party. Ultimately with no legitimate opposition from the right, left-wing governments will become the natural state of play, and our country will certainly be worse for it.

There are three key reasons young people aren't voting for us, and our mission here at the Centre for Youth Policy is to address each of those.

The first one is our liberal values. Our message of freedom and aspiration. Young people don't get it. We live in a culture right now that is defined by victimhood and identity politics, and what that means is 58% of young Australians have a favourable view of socialism. It's beyond comprehension for us.

And the challenge is the modern liberal project thus far has been defined by a desire to discard those old arbitrary identities that we inherited. There shouldn't be a difference between people based on gender, based on race, based on things we don't control. But what's happened now is the left has resurrected all of those things, and the key cultural battles that are gripping young people are defined by them.

The Voice is a war against white colonisers. Climate change is a war against greedy capitalists. Me Too is a war against men, and the rental crisis is a war against baby boomers. This new form of identity politics is reducing young people - and all people - to the very things we fought against as a liberal democracy for the last 50 years.

And what that's doing is it's creating a culture of victimhood where young people don't feel free because you're defined by things you never chose. And if you're not free, you can never be aspirational. So at a fundamental values level, young people don't get our message. And then the problem is as well they don't see our values of freedom and aspiration borne out in policies that speak to them.

There really hasn't been a concerted effort by the Coalition to generate policies and really implement policies that deal with the issues that young people are facing today. And what's worse is we've actually been come to be seen as a party of vested interests defined by our protection of baby boomers, which is absolutely ridiculous. We are a party that believes in getting governments out of the way so everybody can succeed and everybody can determine the direction of their own life. We're not the party of vested interests, but that's how young people have come to see us.

And the third challenge we're facing is that young people aren't hearing our message through the channels that they engage with. The majority of young people, they don't form their political opinions based on dinner table conversations with their parents. They're probably not even eating dinner with their parents.

They're scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and they're listening to influencers talk about political issues. That's how they're forming their opinions. Now the problem is those influencers all happen to be very left wing. In fact, friendlyjordies has over 250 million views on YouTube and millions of subscribers. Really concerningly, he's got a Facebook group with 100,000 young Australians that he can communicate with instantaneously. That is very hard to combat. But he has actually been funded by the unions since 2016. They've been playing this digital game.

Social media really is the new frontier of the political battle. The problem is the left has realised that since the mid 2010s and we are only just switching on, so we've got a lot of work to do in catching up.

But I believe it is possible because there's a hunger out there among young people for a different story, a better story. Not one that tells them that they're victims, their life is hopeless and they have no freedom to change it. And that's where the Centre for Youth Policy comes in. We are working to address all of these three problems. We are working to communicate our values through social media. We're generating policy ideas that are meeting the needs of young people.

We are looking at things like higher education reform, how can we hold universities accountable for the results they produce in their students and not just use universities as a way to extend childhood or, or use international student fees to fund obscure research. We are looking at things like increasing housing supply through planning reform, and cultivating self-reliance in the next generation of Australians in our schools so that by the time they enter the adult world, they understand that not only can they take responsibility for themselves, but they have the power to actually improve their own lives. That's a message that they're not hearing right now.

And finally, we're building a following and a movement of young Australians on social media, on TikTok and on Instagram. I recently posted a series of TikToks on me talking about the Voice. And they've received over a million views. So it is possible. This is just the start and those TikToks took me about five minutes to make per video, 15 minutes total to reach one million young people. 60% of my audience is female, 80% are under the age of 24, and 95% are Australian. That is what we need to be doing more of, and that is our mission here.

If you want to be part of building up, of mentoring, of guiding the next generation of young Australian leaders and making sure that our values of freedom and aspiration, conservatism, classical liberalism and pragmatism are passed on to my generation, our future leaders, then please support our work here because we can't do it without you.

There is a generation of young people out there that are hungry for this message. They are hungry for it. They're looking at our content, they're reading what we're producing. But we need to do more, and that's why the Centre for Youth Policy exists.

This is an edited transcript of remarks delivered by Freya Leach at the launch of the Centre for Youth Policy.